CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. The novel is told in the first person by the protagonist, a writer of pulp fiction who is twenty-seven years old

The novel is told in the first person by the protagonist, a writer of pulp fiction who is twenty-seven years old. The real name of the narrator-protagonist is never given, although characters address him by various nicknames, including “the Crazy.” However, the narrator is clearly based on Bradbury himself. The most significant hint to the narrator’s identity within the novel is his regular summary of stories that he has written in the past. Readers familiar with Bradbury’s stories will recognize all of them, although the titles are never given. However, DLB is a novel, with some fantastic elements, and must be distinguished from an autobiography: readers cannot assume that events in the novel took place as described.

First-person narrators are characters within the stories they tell, and they have the same limits that people do in their everyday lives; that is, a first-person narrator can describe his own thoughts, feelings, actions, and speech as well as the actions and dialogue of other characters. Since this novel has a mystery that the protagonist has already solved and is describing in the past tense, the narrator knows more than the reader. But as with most first-person narratives, the narrator tries to re-create his own perceptions of the events as they took place. Even with that attempt, there is always a certain level of self-conscious reflection and, in the case of a murder mystery, the planting of certain clues that readers may or may not pick up on during their first reading.

The unnamed writer is single and lives in a one-room apartment in Venice, California, supporting himself by his writing. He has published stories in periodicals such as Dime Detective and Black Mask, for what Bradbury remembers earning per story himself at this time: thirty to forty dollars. Since he doesn’t make much, his studio apartment is sparsely furnished. A typewriter contains a sheet of paper with “UNTITLED NOVEL,” his name, and a date three months earlier typed on it. This writer is suffering from writer’s block, brought on by his girlfriend being away in Mexico, or perhaps by the three months of rain. His discovery of the first dead body inspires him to start writing again, specifically a novel titled “Death Is a Lonely Business” (15).

The writer-protagonist is not a character who would exist in the hard-boiled mystery fiction that Bradbury admires: this character chews spear-mint gum (rather than smoking cigarettes) and consumes candy rather than booze. In fact, he tells Elmo Crumley that he’d rather have chocolate malts than beer or other alcoholic drinks. The traditional hard-boiled detective tends to be older, or at least more worldly wise, cynical, hard-drinking, and averse to marriage (but not against sexual liaisons with the women he meets). The protagonist of Death Is a Lonely Business is faithful to his absent girlfriend (who becomes his fiancée during the course of the novel) even when faced with the sexual temptations offered by Constance Rattigan, an older but still gorgeous reclusive film star who enjoys swimming in the nude.

Peg, the narrator’s girlfriend, has a presence in the novel even though she is in Mexico. She and the narrator talk to each other at regular intervals; he has to use the pay phone outside his building. She sends him a photograph when he is afraid he cannot remember exactly what she looks like, and partway through, she proposes to him since he’s been avoiding proposing to her because of his lack of money.

The other major characters in the novel tend to go against the conventions of popular mystery fiction. The police detective, Lieutenant Elmo Crumley, seems fairly traditional at first. He rejects any attempts by an amateur to help solve the murder. However, Crumley soon reveals himself to be well read in literary classics and to be passionately attached to gardening. He can quote or refer to writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, Feodor Dostoevesky, and Alexander Pope. In addition, Crumley is writing his own novel and suffering from writer’s block. He lives in a house surrounded by an exotic garden, where he cultivates African plants.

Another major character is Constance Rattigan, the reclusive film star from the 1920s, who helps the narrator solve the mystery. The narrator spends time staring at her house, which is close to his apartment, and imagines her life as a mysterious recluse. When they finally meet, he tells her he expected to see “someone like Norma Desmond in that movie that just came out” (136). The reference here is to Billy Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Boulevard about an aging silent film star, Norma Desmond, who becomes involved with a young writer. Bradbury’s narrator’s relationship with Constance is as unlike that film as Constance is unlike Norma, but the reference shows how the narrator sees life as similar to movies. He expected an unhappy, obsessive, perhaps alcoholic, woman clinging to her past and trying to recreate it. Instead, she is a vital woman, suntanned and gorgeous, who swims constantly, gave up her film career for what she considers good reason (disgust with the studio system and business), and continues to act by “playing” her chauffeur and maid.

The third important character who helps the narrator solve the murder is Henry (no last name is given). Henry lives in the tenement where the narrator once had a room. He is African American and blind, but is one of the most capable characters in the novel. Henry eventually helps the narrator by loaning him money, recognizing the “smell” of the murderer from earlier visits to the tenement, and helping the narrator track the murderer down and confront him at a pier. Henry also brings Crumley and the police to help the narrator at the end.

Other characters are minor in terms of narrative time, but they are important to the protagonist: these characters are the people he has met and come to care about over the years. They are different in age, gender, and background, but they all have one thing in common: they are eccentric, refusing to conform to social expectations. These characters include friends who live in a tenement five miles from Venice and a group of business owners whose businesses on the Venice Pier are scheduled to be destroyed. They are a reclusive opera singer, known by her stage name Fannie Florianna; Cal, a barber who gives the worst haircuts in the world; a “practicing psychologist” with five thousand books named A. L. Shrank; Mr. Shapeshade, a theater owner; and Annie Oakley, who owns a shooting gallery.

The final group of characters are the ostensible victims of the murderer: this group includes people the narrator does not know by name as well as some of his friends. The murderer describes his victims as the “Lonelies,” and the narrator sees them as having failed or having been disappointed in some important way. The victims are a retired trolley operator; a bedridden elderly woman who kept canaries; Cal the barber (who disappears); Pietro, who lives with dozens of animals he rescued; Sam and Jimmy from the tenement; Fannie; and Constance Rattigan, who disappears along with another retired film star, John Wilkes Hopwood. Not all the victims die: Cal returns home to his family; Constance hides out before returning to help the narrator solve the crime. But most die or are irretrievably harmed. All the victims live alone and seem to lack some social connection, which makes them vulnerable to the murderer.

The murderer is present from the start of the novel but not identified as the murderer until the end. The murderer is first introduced as an anonymous shape on the trolley. Late at night, a drunk tells the narrator (who tries to ignore him) that death is a lonely business. By the end of the novel, the narrator learns that the murderer has been tracking him, considering him a potential victim until he started selling his stories and fell in love with Peg, which made him no longer one of the “Lonelies.” After the murderer stops thinking of the writer as a potential victim, he uses him to track other victims. The murderer turns out to be A. L. Shrank, the practicing psychologist, who lives in a shack on the pier, surrounded by exactly “five thousand nine hundred and ten books” (67).

The narrator and Shrank are presented as similar but opposing characters throughout the novel. At the beginning, both Crumley and Constance suspect or at least wonder whether the narrator is the one hurting or killing people. Fannie believes the narrator, although a close friend of hers, could bring death to her. The narrator writes stories that, based on his descriptions, embody terrifying themes about the loss of love, life, and identity. Shrank is a bibliophile (book lover) who lives in the midst of 5,910 books about death, depression, and the loss of self. The two share a single trolley ride together at the beginning of the novel; at the end, Shrank tells him that he followed him around to discover new victims. The narrator-writer goes around to collect people for his books, while Shrank collects them for his murder plot. Both the narrator and Shrank maintain a certain distance from people: the narrator because he uses people as the basis for his characters, and Shrank because he sets them up to die. Finally, the narrator, suffering writer’s block, is moved to write a novel using the words the murderer said to him at the start as the title: “Death Is a Lonely Business.”

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